MacTicker brings the stock market to your desktop

Marc LaFoy is one of those Macintosh enthusiasts with just the right combination of loyalty and luck that had him buying Apple stock last year when it was languishing around $15.00 a share . . . just before starting its seven-month climb to a high of $43.75.

As it turned out, however, there were then no Macintosh applications for gathering stock quotes from the Internet. “I wish I could’ve watched all the excitement right on my desktop,” says Marc. “But I had to settle with looking up AAPL every day on a website and reloading the page whenever my curiosity got the better of me.”

These last few weeks, however, Marc has been heavily involved in the final testing of MacTicker, a simple Macintosh application from Galleon Software that lets you easily browse stock market information from financial websites around the world. You can watch any number of your stocks roll by on an animated stock ticker, or call up a detailed report for each of your favorites.

MacTicker updates this information once a minute right on your desktop. You can configure it to alert you to stocks that are doing particularly well, or warn you when a company is sinking.

“MacTicker is a specialized web browser,” says Colin Biggin, the lead developer on the project. “It sends the same queries you would generate if you were visiting these websites using Netscape or Internet Explorer, and then it interprets the HTML code it gets back.”

But instead of just displaying a static page for each stock, MacTicker builds a scrolling display containing the status of each of the stocks you’ve chosen. It also displays detailed information on individual stocks that is updated along with the information on the ticker, from a comprehensive report of the stock’s fundamentals to a tiny display that you can move into the corner of your desktop and watch in the background.

MacTicker gathers American, Canadian, and European market information from any of a number of online financial sites. Each of these sites offer free delayed stock quotes from a number of different sources. Delayed quotes are generally 15-20 minutes behind the expensive real-time service required by professional traders, but are well suited for the casual investor.